(printed today), the number of dead, which includes those lost by Cantor Fitzgerald, the New York Fire Department, the more than 165 diners and staff at Windows on the World, as well as the passengers on the two planes, comes to only 2,950. Which is significantly higher than the official count of 4,764 (which has been even higher).
This is good news, of course, and in no way makes the event anything less of a tragedy.
But how could they not know the number of dead, after six weeks? After all, no man is an island, and everybody has some relatives, friends, or at least a landlord who would have noticed that they were gone, and reported this fact. Could somebody explain? When will there be a final list of the victims?
There have been duplicate names on the lists, and other list-keeping oddities.
Bear in mind that the death toll, whatever it is, increased by one more this week. A woman died from severe burns. She was sitting beneath the WTC towers when she was sprayed by flaming jet fuel.
That’s the thing about a catastrophe of this magnitude. Not only are thousands of people dead, but they died in hundreds of different ways.
Apart from the list keeping problems, I don’t think everyone who went missing that day was necessarily added to the list.I was at the WTC about a year ago for a seminar. There were so many visitors there that I had to wait on line for over half-an-hour for a visitor’s pass.Had I not come home that night, my husband almost certainly would have reported it,but probably wouldn’t have known I was there {because I doubt I told him where the seminar was)
The Associated Press released an independent tally of 2,612 dead today. Appearantly, a lot of the problems stem from duplicate reports of missing people. Could it be that companies have reported their employees as missing, and families have reported family members as missing, and it has taken some time to sort this out?
Should the authorities have withheld reporting the number of dead until they were more certain, or did they do the right thing in releasing a “ballpark figure”?
The highest tally from the city of New York was 6,453, reported three days after the attack.
No one ever claimed that any of the original estimates were precise and the implicit assumption was always that the death toll would drop once more accurate information became available. Moreover, any comparison between official estimates and ‘independent’ estimates can be expected to reveal such discrepancies, as the independent estimates will tend to underestimate the death toll - some casaulties reported to the authorities will not be known to even the most careful and best-informed journalist.
True, but maybe conservative estimates would have been more considerate, not only to those directly affected, but to frightened people all over the world? After all, what purpose does it serve to increase the shock and grief people feel?
Still, maybe the exact number isn’t really that important. We can be pretty sure it’s somewhere between 3000 and 5000. Maybe one day we’ll now for sure, and people will talk about (say) “the 3,941 of 2001”. Time will tell, as always.
An estimate is an estimate. That’s what it was and that’s what they said it was. What possible benefit would there be in artificailly lowering some number based on your best information? Is there someone out there whose husband or wife has been missing from the WTC for six weeks who might be comforted that he/she is one of 2,000 instead of one of 6,000?
More importantly, do we really want our government lying to us because they think it might make us feel better?
Well, an old cliché of a certain type of movie is where some major disaster occurs and government representatives show up to “hush up” the story so as not to “cause panic”.
To their credit, democratic governments don’t seem to do this very often.